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Tuesday, February 21, 2017

`What a Necrology of Notability!'

Last
week, Andrew Rickard at Graveyard Masonry posted a passage from “Library of Old
Authors,” an essay collected in James Russell Lowell’s My Study Windows(1871). The first sentence – “What a sense of
security in an old book which Time has criticised for us!” – echoes my own
suspicion that critics are superfluous, and discerning readers are the legitimate
arbiters of literary worth. My library’s copy of Lowell’s book is the
twenty-third edition, published in 1886, which suggests his one-time popularity.
“Library of Old Authors” is eighty-four pages long. Lowell’s style will
remind readers of Charles Lamb. Detractors will find it fulsome or fusty. His
pacing is leisurely and conversational, more like a storyteller’s than a
stiff-necked academic’s. His sentences can be enormously (and comically) long.
Lowell is an entertainer as well as a man of letters, and style is a means
of charming, not dazzling, offending or boring the reader.

Lowell’s
essay is ostensibly a review of Library
of Old Authors, a series of reprints published by John Russell Smith of
London between 1856 and 1864. Lowell is not uncritical, and he writes in a
manner not seen since the triumph of Modernism a century ago:

“It
is not easy to divine the rule which has governed Mr. Smith in making the selection
for his series. A choice of old authors should be a florilegium [OED: “a
collection of the flowers of literature, an anthology”], and not a botanist’s hortus siccus [“an arranged collection
of dried plants; a herbarium”], to which grasses are as important as the single
shy blossom of a summer. The old-maidenly genius of antiquarianism seems to
have presided over the editing of the Library.”

The
Latin tags, elevated vocabulary and stringent whimsy are borrowed straight from
Lamb. When Lowell writes, “We confess a bibliothecarian avarice that gives all
books a value in our eye,” we recall “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading”
and Hazlitt’s “On Reading Old Books.” Lowell preaches respect for his old
authors, and condemns the sloppiness of editing he finds in the series: “It is
impossible that men who cannot construct an English sentence correctly, and who
do not know the value of clearness in writing, should be able to disentangle
the knots which slovenly printers have tied in the thread of an old author’s
meaning.” Lowell gives a remarkably close and learned reading of many texts,
with emphasis on scholarly incompetence, and reaches new heights of invective.
Of writers whose work is “mainly bibliographic” (that is, not literary) – a distinction
all but evaporated today -- Lowell writes:

“As
literature, they are oppressive; as items of literary history they find their
place in that vast list which records not only those named for promotion, but
also the killed, wounded, and missing in the Battle of the Books. There are
hearts touched with something of the same vague pathos that dims the eye in
some deserted graveyard. The brief span of our earthly immortalities is brought
home to us as nowhere else. What a necrology of notability!”

In
a fractionally more hopeful mood Lowell writes, “There is scarcely any
rubbish-heap of literature out of which something precious may not be raked by
the diligent explorer,” which has always been one of the working assumptions
here at Anecdotal Evidence.

Lowell
is amusingly merciless with one of the editors in the series, William Carew
Hazlitt, grandson of the great essayist:

“We
are profoundly grateful for the omission of a glossary. It would have been a
nursery and seminary of blunder. To expose pretentious charlatanry is sometimes
the unpleasant duty of a reviewer. It is a duty we never seek, and should not
have assumed in this case but for the impertinence with which Mr. Hazlitt has
treated dead and living scholars, the latchets of whose shoes he is not worthy
to unloose, and to express their gratitude to whom is, or ought to be, a
pleasure to all honest lovers of their mother-tongue.”